Is there a phenomenon more elusive to the stage than the functional family? With the exception of a few absurdist comedies, it's difficult to conjure a list of canonical plays in which kin interact politely, speak civilly and resolve conflict without recourse to threats and weaponry.

Brantley speaks, of course, metaphorically. The Greeks didn't: an astonishing number of the earliest surviving plays describe families who slaughter – and occasionally snack on – their nearest and dearest.

I was reminded last week when I led my university classes through Aeschylus's Oresteia, which wins my vote for the greatest dysfunctional family saga ever to grace the stage. Here's a tip: Never go to dinner at the House of Atreus. Oh, and don't have a bath there either. Aeschylus's unusually homicidal relations include one father who sacrifices a son, another who slaughters a daughter, an uncle who broils two nephews, a wife who stabs a husband, and the son who stabs his mother in reciprocal revenge – only to have his mother return from the grave and attempt revenge in turn.

It takes at least five gods – three of them screaming and wreathed in snakes – and the establishment of the world's first jury system to sort the whole mess out. Really, it's a good thing the Greeks kept the violence behind the skene (a building behind the playing area) or else no one could afford to produce these plays. The stage blood alone would bankrupt the average troupe.

My classes next read Oedipus (son murders father), Medea (mother knifes sons) and The Bacchae (mother dismembers son, displays his head as a hunting trophy). I rather like the fact that Parents' Weekend always falls at just this point in the syllabus.

Speeding ahead a couple of millennia, playwrights produce fewer works in which children are stewed and their parents speared, but audience members still clamour to watch relatives eviscerate each other, now more often with words rather than forged steel.

I have to confess I've never entirely understood the appeal of this genre. I grew up in a household in which shouting and tears were the preferred means of communication, so an evening of Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee threatens post-traumatic stress disorder. But I wonder if for most people these plays come as a perverse reassurance – a way for audiences to comfort themselves that, however unhappy their own clan, others were much worse. Or possibly they offer a kind of catharsis, a public way to explore and purge uncomfortable private emotions. Or maybe it's pure schadenfreude. I've yet to see a production of the Oresteia that truly terrified me, but I've seen a couple in which the tragic pile-on conjures a kind of perverse delight.

The question is: are any contemporary plays to rival Aeschylus's achievement? And why do you think this genre still enthralls audiences?